The Beauty Myth

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How do you talk about beauty? What can you possibly say about it, unless you’re willing to examine the actual entire breadth of human experience? We experience and express beauty in nature and art, in music, as a fleeting image or a half-forgotten memory. Many of us also perform beauty—or, at least, what we are told beauty means in the way that word is supposed to apply to female bodies.

In so many cultures, being a “beautiful woman” stands for thin, pale-skinned, cisgender, and able-bodied—an image that is obviously limiting in terms of diversity and lacking in imagination, so the discourse surrounding beauty shifts toward one calling for inclusivity. But that’s not the argument I want to be part of. Instead, I want to talk about the relentless demand placed on girls to perform beauty in the first place. The unspoken understanding that girls must perform beauty unfailingly and incessantly as a crucial part of their selfhoods cuts across cultures and is present in every facet of popular media—and it’s not just an understanding, but something of a demand. What I want to argue is that this is far from the necessity we’ve been taught to see it as. It is inessential to our lives as women, and can be thoroughly dispensed with.

My struggle with performing beauty was conducted through the lens of being fat. Thinness was my bugbear, a crucial aspect of beauty that I failed at, dramatically, repeatedly. I was a fat child, and it never really bothered me until I crashed into my teens and realized that there was an entire social currency that I, as a too-tall, too-fat 11-year-old girl was bereft of. When auditions were announced for the fifth-grade school play, I was rabidly eager to be chosen as the princess. The teacher in charge looked over my shorn head and general gawkiness, and chose the petite girl with the long braid in the front row. I was confounded. I was one of the best students, and certainly the best at language (if not the most articulate, because I stammered). I had never not expected to be picked that day, and it was the first time I became aware that huge, fat girls with cropped hair do not make good princesses.

Throughout my teens, my lack of beauty was rubbed in by friends who complimented me on my pretty face with a gentle reminder that I really should lose weight, by boys who saw me as “one of them,” except when it came to the punchline of the fat joke they made me out to be, by the thin and pretty girls, whose laughter followed me in classrooms and hallways, out in the courtyard and all the way home.

This presented a problem: Above all, I wanted to be loved. In the absence of anything of the sort from my family, I was convinced my only hope of someone loving me lay in finding a boyfriend. As I grew older, and my friends paired off one by one into their private worlds of adoring glances, hand-holding and so much more I couldn’t even comprehend (making out! sex!), I was still the fat joke…but where I was once one of the boys, now the entire male population of the school avoided me en masse in case any of them were ever caught talking to me and had to suffer the ensuing shame.

When I was 17, my then–best friend set me up with a boy she knew. We went to a secluded café that evening and he spared no time before furiously launching his body onto mine. The next day, when I saw him in the hallway, he looked straight through me and walked on. My body was only to be desired in secret and was unworthy of public acknowledgement.

By the time I reached my 20s, my ongoing failure to be beautiful had become something of an obsession. It dwarfed all else: I developed an eating disorder. My personality, ambitions, diet, even my body language were all geared towards this singular objective, and the untold joy it would supposedly bring. If in high school, I made the effort to ask guys out despite the inevitable rejection, in college I stared them all down with an armored gaze that screamed, “I reject YOU.” Not now, I told myself, Not yet. I wanted love, but I wanted to be worthy of it, and so it had to wait. I’d been introduced to the transformative power of personal grooming in my last couple of years in high school, and like every other girl in my social group, I waxed, threaded, shaved, tweezed, and none of it really made a difference. Or, at least, not the kind of difference that mattered to me because I was still fat and getting fatter, and it felt like I was embellishing something that wasn’t worthy of the attention, something that would be ridiculous no matter how many manicures I got.

this is absolutely beautiful. I have had acne since the age of, oh 12, and I am almost 26. There were days, weeks even where I wouldn’t go out socially because i didn’t deem myself beautiful or worthy enough.

It is empowering reading about someone who worked through their struggles with standardized beauty and continues to do so. I feel like it is a battle that is never 100% “won”

This is so great. I hadn’t lost a lot of my baby fat by the time middle school rolled around and you know how middle schoolers are. What I regret most is that I let those people drive me away (I had to move schools ). I kno now that I am capable of beng loved and I am beautiful.

This is too beautiful!! I’ve been through similar, except I was made fun of for being too thin and was the centre of the “flat” jokes. I was bullied mercilessly in elementary school because of this and no one really cared to do anything about it until I developed depression and an eating disorder. It’s good to hear other people pull through similar situations as you, thank you so much for this Ragini!

this was a hard one to read. we’ve lived very similar lives. my journey to rejecting beauty actually started in 6th grade. i had had enough of everyone pointing out all of my “possibilities” and went out and did it for a whole week. partially to gauge their reaction, and partially over a boy i’d had a huge crush on. all of the compliments and attention that followed made me forget that these same people had given me shit for being fat, sloppy, poorly dressed (-insert commentary on how beauty-centric body positivity is prone to being entrenched in classism-), etc. it also made me feel the most self-conscious i’ve ever felt in my entire life. this was 10 years ago and i still haven’t beaten that. on the friday of that week my mother noticed the change when i actually asked her if the clothes i was wearing made me look pretty. she was happy to question why i asked that but i suddenly felt like a fraud. i wasn’t dressing for me. i wasn’t being me anymore. it was a glorified version of me that was palatable to everyone except me. the following monday, much to the chagrin of my peers/mother, i went back in my thrift store cartigan, large white dominican republic tourist shirts, and jeans that may or may not have been falling apart in the inner thigh. it would be 7 years until fat stopped being bad, and 9 and a half until i started questioning the negative connotation of the word “ugly,” a term i now take great pride in. i’m 21 years old now and every now and again on social media i try to pose questions or give people food for thought on why dismantling beauty standards

shouldn’t end at finding yourself beautiful. If you want to be beautiful and if you perform it for yourself, I think that’s wonderful as long as you are taking care of yourself (and if you’re not, it’s not something that should be shamed but rather responded to with love and compassion). But I don’t think that at the end of the day women/non-binary peeps/ANYONE should HAVE to be beautiful or see themselves as beautiful in order to love themselves. In 9th grade this senior tried to pick on me on the bus home from a field trip (small school, whole HS can fit on 1 bus and a car) but before he finished I fired “What are you going to say? I’m ugly? I’m fat? I have bad skin? Bad hair? These are things I know and I honestly don’t care. Come up with something new and leave me alone.” *insert all the over-exaggerated OOOOHS and OHHHHS from all of the kids who’d heard*
The point is that being ugly shouldn’t BE a bad thing. It’s just a thing! It’s just a characteristic. Some people are more attractive by conventional and unconventional factors, and some aren’t at all. They shouldn’t HAVE to be. Whatever your truest self is, that is what you should always strive towards and work towards. Beautiful or average or ugly, fat or thin or average, flat chested or full chested, big dick or little dick. These things matter only as much as you choose to accept them and the way you react to that acceptance. None of them should ever mean that you are anything less than goddamn perfect.It’s a tough world/thing/system to fight and if it takes you a while to get there, then so be it. Do you, love you.

Your writing is so strong and multilayered! You really put us in your head so well, and went back and forth between times in your life seamlessly.

I’m a guy but can still relate to some of this. At various points in my life, I was hung up on my looks and convinced I was not cute enough, which also clouded my self esteem somewhat. With that said, I realize my experience with the issue is nowhere near equivalent to a woman’s due to the sexism around beauty standards/girls being deemed only worthy to exist if hot.

Hey Ragini, this article is amazing. I’ve felt so many of the same things as you did, but thankfully I see much more of my value now. I really relate to what you said about being excluded from femininity, I’ve felt this a lot and it really hurts. It’s just so cruel that we’re taught that we have to be a certain way to be a woman. I am female and I feel female inside, but society makes me feel like I’m not allowed to be unless I conform to certain things, and I feel like I’m being laughed at. I hope things change and we can live in the world you described in the last paragraph. Thank you so much. xxx

This article – both its skilled writing and its content – is very valuable to me. Thank you. It deplays exactly the honesty, the truthfulness, the insight and the complexity that are pre-requisite for a conversation about beauty and womanhood.
Let’s carry out that discussion with confidence!

First things first, congrats on coming to such a wonderful place where you are you. Your writing is unexplainably brilliant and I adore this article.

I still have my own mindset of ‘everything will be perfect if I just lost a bit more weight’ even though I know I am the perfect weight for my age and height I am not satisfied. I run for fun and also just to keep healthy since the only other sport I take part in is field hockey. I lost a lot of weight five years ago when I was diagnosed with diabetes and I miss being that thin, even though I know it wasn’t a healthy weight, I still want it. It is exhausting to be forever correcting myself that I am beautiful and I am enough but I hope one day I can get there.

Beauty is such a weird, difficult, topic for me to wrap my head around. I fluctuate wildly between wanting to have perfect skin, teeth, face, body, doing anything I can/spending as much money as I can to “fix” myself, and on other days, realizing how little I care about these things that will supposedly make me beautiful. In a good mood I can think of so many more important things that I’d love to focus my attention on. Things that really feel fulfilling. But, it’s just as you’ve said. I have this feeling that I am putting off, love, being loved, that whole bucket of wonderful things, because I feel unworthy. When I was with the only guy I’ve ever dated and he would call me beautiful, I would cringe and think, “Oh my god, he has to be lying.” I was so insecure in myself that I couldn’t even fathom someone else thinking I am beautiful, as is. Reading this just makes me want to be so bold and unapologetic about who I am and how I look. Thank you! x

Wonderfully written, though hard to read. Beauty can really fuck one up, and I admire you so deeply for being able to turn your back on beauty standards and love your body.
I’m on the road myself to love my body for what it is, and seeing something like this makes me believe it’s possible.

Thank you Ragini and you have my deepest wish for future you’ll enjoy !!

This is so beautiful and is now one of my favorite pieces on Rookie by far. I didn’t think I would relate because instead of feeling overweight I feel too skinny. But by the end I was crying a LOT and realized that I too have fallen into society’s trap of impossible beauty standards, and realizing this exposes how much it has negatively affected how I view myself as a person. Thank you for this. This essay is so healing and I believe it should become required reading for everyone on the planet (a bit far-fetched I know, but I really believe it)!